Patricia Mou

That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult — if you don’t lose it.

Choosing the right set of Lego blocks for your thinking is the key, and it's harder than it may seem. There is so much knowledge out there – how are you supposed to decide whether something goes into a "first-principles thinking tool-chest".

Members of a tribe expect to benefit from investing into the tribe - and they might decide to leave if those benefits never manifest - but it matters little to them when and how exactly they receive that benefit.

Five steps on how to build a tribe:Identification: find and be foundCommunication: increase bandwidthCooperation: create valueReification: make your group “a thing”Adaptation: find the dark forces to preserve the essence of your thing

2. Comfort with Discomfort.  Discomfort leads to growth. It is an absolute necessity.  If you train yourself to accept and embrace discomfort, you will always have an edge.

Time is not fungible – a given moment of opportunity, or a chance to respond appropriately to a crisis, might not occur again.

I believe that extolling the pursuit of happiness was a toxic stupidity entirely unworthy of my greatest American hero, Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it is a poison that sickens our culture more wretchedly every nanosecond. I wish he'd never said it.It produces a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our national psyche that encourages us ever more... See more

A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced from any other assumption. In Mathematics, these are called axioms.